We’ve been in ecological debt for over a century. We’re exponentially increasing the human population while per capita consumption of the Earth’s resources also rises. Biodiversity is in free-fall as habitats are destroyed and wildlife is being hunted to extinction.

The powers that be and their PR firms know all this. They’ve focused on changing a few terms around to absolve little more than our guilt. Buzzword marketing slogans like ‘Green Capitalism‘ and ‘Smart Growth‘ contain as much honesty as ‘clean coal‘, ‘sustainable seafood‘, ‘responsible forestry‘ and ‘humane slaughter‘. Our values of progress have been perverted by Wall Street analysts paid to judge success as perpetual domination of our planet.

We view images of Detroit and collectively think, ‘What went wrong? How can we restore our glory? We must retool and make more cars!‘

Like everything in nature, cities have cycles – some indifferent, a few compassionate, but many cruel. We flaw in priding ourselves on a ‘growing city’ predicated on incoming residents, wealthy developers, and taller, more extravagant buildings. Jane Jacobs may have toppled Robert Moses, but subsequent generations raised on Sim City have come to believe they’re Gods the urban landscape.

Growing up I’d always thought of being Liberal as a virtue. During the last Bush administration, it was liberals who were anti-war, who marched for peace, who demanded action on global warming, who were the backbone of the struggling labor movement.

What concern liberals still have for climate change usually gets channeled into signing online petitions from MoveOn or 350. Rarely do they display solidarity with the people taking direction action against KXL or other devastating extraction operations. Liberals tell us to remain nonviolent during protests, regardless of the violence committed by police, and regardless of the institutional violence committed every day against marginalized communities. The liberal of today is concerned with better bicycle lanes, but not rising rents that soon follow. And why should they? Life’s pretty good with Democrats running the show, as long as you’re a Democrat.

Perhaps they worried naming the crossing after a man who succumbed to depression and chose to take his own life could potentially send a negatively inspirational message. Portland already has a poor track record when it comes to bridge-jumpers. If this connection is the reason TriMet decided to cancel a democratic naming process, we’ll likely never know, as their press statement fell short of acutely explaining the selection process. It would be truly disappointing if TriMet refused to honor this man’s memorable life purely for his choice to end it.

For those unfamiliar, or for those who believed this train-wreck had finally ended, it’s worth reviewing a few more of the facts. The CRC can not honestly be called a ‘bridge’. It is a 10-12 lane, 5 mile long freeway expansion and light rail extension over the Columbia River from Portland to Vancouver, WA. While doing nothing to reduce vehicle trips times or congestion, the CRC’s design and tolling appears entirely dependent on actually encouraging more trips to be taken by automobile, in total disregard for the climate crisis we now face.

Oh, how deep the depths of cycling ignorance within the minds of those who do not ride. Ask any bike advocate and they’ll likely agree, half the work of getting more people commuting via bicycle involves dispelling the myths non-riders have about bicycling. It doesn’t help when people in positions of power make asinine put-downs on bikes or the people who ride them.

Of course, that’s still what many with a national audience often do. This weekend, president Obama’s former senior advisor David Axelrod took to Twitter to voice his confusion over Chicago’s weather, bike share, and helmet use all in one single tweet, eliciting replies from pretty much every-damn-body.

Does any other city have these goofy rental bike stands-people riding w/out helmets, even in dead of winter-or is that unique to Chicago?

Recently, an unidentified plant I rescued some four years ago began to flower. I couldn’t recall if it had before, but as the buds grew fuller and more colorful, they began to form purple speckles the like I know I’d never seen on any plant of mine before. With a few minutes of searching online I was able to confirm they were in fact orchids, their exotic variations having long been the subject of novelists, painters, and poets.

This revelation gave me a sudden, unexpected appreciation for the years of greenthumbing I’d practiced in my home. I realized that starting as a small boy, I’d always kept a multitude of plants around. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of gardening in rural Michigan, my mother showing me how to snap open raw pea pods and eat them right off the stalk. In moving out West, it turned out I wasn’t alone.

In Portland, community gardening is as American as apple pie and loaded firearms. Here, the thought of maintaining a grass lawn that could otherwise grow food is frowned upon. And the practice of seed-bombing is just about the most satisfying act of tactical urbanism one can enjoy, whether solo or with a group of comrades. It’s something I’ve done numerous times with friends. Now that a frigid December has locked in and we’re facing potential single-digit overnight lows, I feel a palpable urge to launch seed-packed balls of dirt through the air to their inevitable earthen targets.

Okay, I’m gonna try to keep this one short. After dancing on the grave of the CRC this summer, I’ve largely refrained from dragging myself through the nauseating task of tapping fingers to keyboard yet again over this $4 to $10 billion dollar mistake that just keeps on mistaking. Here we go.

To be clear, this is still a Dead Freeway. Oregon governor Kitzhaber declared such this summer, and despite his and other state Democrat’s best delusional efforts, the freeway mega-expansion has not been reanimated. The bonds approved in HB 2800 expired on September 30th, as mandated by several trigger requirements that were never met. There have, however, been some recent revelations worth noting. I’ll attempt to be brief.

Clackamas Country commissioners are demanding to see traffic diversion data generated by CRC contractor CDM Smith that, according to economist Joe Cortright, proves that new tolls on the CRC will divert so much traffic from the I-5 to the 205 that (A) the CRC will never pay for itself, and (B) so much more traffic will enter Clackamas and East Portland that citizens there will cough up a polluted lung while driving around searching for a space to park in their own hometown.

We think we’re safe in the city. There’s so many of us together, it’s assumed not much bad will happen. At the least it should happen to somebody else, hopefully not somebody you know. A shooting, a car crash, we move on. Few events screech our lives to a halt, demanding our collective attention for the sake of emergency.

We crave these kinds of happenings, though. Just the power going out has us racing to Facebook and Twitter, giddy to share this unexpected experience. True pandaemonium does occasionally occur. However, disasters like San Francisco in 1991, New York in 2001, or New Orleans in 2005 are so well documented that they remain etched into our collective memory. But is it enough?

Catastrophe from generations past linger, too. The Chicago fire, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the dust bowl years – all have found places in our public ed textbooks. Dig deeper than what you learned in school, though, and the mind boggles how we’ve survived this long. What follows are a handful of mostly man-made disasters that dwarf recent history in scale and ferocity.

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Seattle, 1957 – Okay, as far as disasters go, this wasn’t actually that bad. Nobody died, but only barely. Usually just small enough to swallow a car or truck, the phenomenon of sinkholes has always fascinated me. That the ground can simply opening up with little warning – swallowing people and property – is frankly terrifying. Larger episodes, however rare, are the stuff of nightmares. The recent sinkhole in Guatemala City took a 3-story building some 200 feet straight down into a perfectly round maw the diameter of an entire intersection. Such massive sinkholes we usually attribute to poorer nations without First World maintenance or proper seismic monitoring. Yet nature and physics so often make a mockery of this kind of cognitive dissonance (think Titanic). Such was the case in Seattle, 1957.